PSNI to get Price interview

A DUP MP has said many senior IRA members could be implicated after a court agreed to hand over top secret interviews with a convicted Old Bailey car bomber to the authorities.

Boston College must give police the recordings by its researchers of oral history project talks with Dolours Price by next month, after an appeals court in the US rejected an effort to stop their release.

The British Government has been seeking the interviews.

East Londonderry MP Gregory Campbell said: “This is a step closer to establishing if there is information in the tapes that might be of assistance to the authorities in Northern Ireland.

“This could lead to the investigation of many senior personnel within the IRA and other groups about matters they were involved in, and if that is the case it would be welcome.”

Price participated in the car bombing of the Old Bailey in London on March 8 1973. The explosion injured more than 200 people and likely caused another person’s death of heart failure.

She and sister Marian Price were arrested along with senior Sinn Fein member and former junior minister Gerry Kelly and others. They were convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment, but later released.

Friday’s ruling by the 1st US Circuit Court of Appeals means the interview with bomber Dolours Price will be given to police next month. Boston College in Massachusetts is still trying to quash a broader order for other materials from its project.

The College’s Belfast Project participants say the interviews were supposed to be secret until their deaths. But Northern Ireland police probing the IRA’s 1972 killing of Belfast woman Jean McConville, a mother of 10 branded as a British Army spy by the IRA, want the recordings.

The university did not appeal against a district court order last year to turn over the Price interviews, though project director Ed Moloney and ex-IRA member Anthony McIntyre did.

The appeal court ruled they had no right to stop the release.

DUP peer Lord Maurice Morrow said: “Mrs McConville was abducted and murdered on the alleged charge of being a British spy and her blood remains on the hands of those who ordered and committed this repulsive crime.

“At a time when, amongst others, republicans rejoice in the announcement of a PSNI investigation into Bloody Sunday, the release of these tapes for a separate incident which has haunted Northern Ireland for almost as long, must be welcomed by all right thinking people.

“It will be interesting to see if Sinn Fein are as vociferous in their support of this PSNI investigation as they are with that of Bloody Sunday.”

SITE MAP

The value of the Oral Tradition is its democracy; it doesn't give to an intellectual elite the exclusive right to shape a communal memory and the collective memory. It makes into a common wealth the story of our shared lives. It's something that we share in common – and it's like a collection plate into which we can all put something: our stories, our myths and the ease with which we are able to, in some way, cross boundaries. - Cleophus Thomas, Jr.

First Circuit Court of Appeals

May, 2013

“… we must forcefully conclude that preserving the judicial power to supervise the enforcement of subpoenas in the context of the present case, guarantees the preservation of a balance of powers… In substance, we rule that the enforcement of subpoenas is an inherent judicial function which, by virtue of the doctrine of separation of powers, cannot be constitutionally divested from the courts of the United States. Nothing in the text of the US-UK MLAT, or its legislative history, has been cited by the government to lead us to conclude that the courts of the United States have been divested of an inherent judicial role that is basic to our function as judges.”

“… the district court acted within its discretion in ordering their production, it abused its discretion in ordering the production of a significant number of interviews that only contain information that is in fact irrelevant to the subject matter of the subpoena.”

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